The image of God in the Bible is a projection of the normal
human, raised to the highest degree. This excludes the human body which is
different. Knowledge itself is based in bodily experience, and a starting place
for a theology of disability may be found in the phenomenology of different
bodies. When philosophers and theologians use the image of the face of God, this
hegemony of the average is particularly noticeable. Blind people are only one
of a number of human experiences without the face, and if the theological
tradition is to be redeemed from the dominance of exclusion, the image of God
must be poly-anthropomorphic rather than uniform.

University of Birmingham

England

15 July 2000

God as Above Average

The human image of God is usually thought of as the image of the perfectly
normal human, but raised to an even higher level of perfection. God never
sleeps. "He who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches
over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep" (Ps.121: 3bf). God could not be
thought of as suffering from upper limb malfunction or as being hard of hearing.
"Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull
to hear" (Is. 59: 1). The God who is in the image of the perfect human
being must possess all the faculties and members of perfect humanity. "He
who planted the ear, does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not
see?" (Ps. 94:9).God is not only thought of as a sighted person, but as
being a person whose sight far extends the power of human vision. "For the
Lord does not see as humans see, for humans look upon the outward appearance but
the Lord looks upon the heart" ( 1 Sam. 16:7). "Sheol is naked before
God, and Abaddon has no covering" (Job 26:6). When God made human beings in
God’s own image, inference from the normal human body suggests that God must
have the normal human powers when thought of in human terms. God walks in the
Garden of Eden; God does not limp (Gen. 3: 8). "Ascribe to the Lord, oh
mighty ones, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength" (Ps. 29:1). If God is
to have a voice, the voice of God must be louder than the voice of the mighty
warriors. "The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is
majestic. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars..." (Ps. 29:4f).

The God of the Bible is the God of the able-bodied not of the disabled. Women
were not permitted to be priests (Lev. 21:16-20), and the God of the Bible is
not a woman. Men with a physical defect were not permitted to be priests, and
the God of the Bible does not possess physical defects.

No doubt all this is obvious and was inevitable. Indeed, that the image of
God is a projection from able-bodied life is so obvious as to be generally
invisible by the able-bodied. After all, sighted people do not know that they
are sighted. They think the world is just like that. The world of sight is
absolutised as being the only world. This sighted world must be relativised if
minority groups are not to be marginalised. The biblical image of God in human
likeness represents the domination of the normal, the totalism of the average.

Such language is not a mere poetic decoration. It is not to be understood on
the linguistic level, as if it were a mere case of metaphor, and to classify it
as anthropomorphism is inadequate, since that would be to gather up the whole of
humanity within the average. The form (morphe) of the human (anthropos)
is thought of as comprising only the normal. The human family, however, extends
beyond the normal; it comprises many who are not average. If the word were poly-
anthropomorphism, the plurality of the human forms would be affirmed, but the
fact is that the human image of God in the Bible is not many-formed but is
uniform.

There are signs of weakness, of course. God weeps, has changes of mind,
proceeds by trial and error, and suffers parental disappointment ( Gen. 2:18f;
6:6; Hos. 11:1f), but all this is still within the range of the normal. If the
God of the Bible suffers from parental disappointment and failure, it is because
God’s children are rebellious and disobedient, not because God cannot strike
them hard enough to maintain discipline, or cannot run fast enough to catch
them. We must go deeper than the levels of metaphor and analogy if we are to
understand the nature of these projections. The metaphors are but symptoms of a
certain kind of embodied epistemology.

Body Knowledge

Much modern semantic theory regards meaning as residing in propositions. Only
propositions are capable of carrying meaning, which may be true or false in
accordance with its successful reference to the actual world. This leads to the
possibility of a universal language in which reality is objectively described.
The world of truth and the propositions which embody truth is distinct from the
worlds of imagination and memory, which are regarded as being individualistic.
As sensations or perceptions, such individual experiences are not capable of
contributing to the positive or negative character of truth unless they can be
stated in linguistic form. On this objectivist view of language, truth is to be
found in the relationship between symbols, these in turn being spoken or printed
words built into sentences. Although empirical verificationalist forms of this
semantic theory insist that the meaning of propositions must be translatable in
principle into certain experiences or sensations, the body is looked upon as the
locus for the verification of meaning rather than the body being regarded as the
source or origin of meaning itself.

This rejection of the body as the source of meaning is consistent with
objectivist views of theological language. According to such views, religious or
theological meaning is also found in sentences which express beliefs. Those who
defend the truth-claims of religious statements against positivistic semantics
usually do so by qualifying or denying the empirical verification theory, but
share with their opponents the view that bodily experiences are not relevant to
the search for truth. Truth resides in ideas or beliefs. Truth, it is thought,
is spiritual or intellectual. Truth is stated in concepts, which are
interrogated by the rational mind, to which the body makes no contribution.

Thus the flesh is to be distinguished from the spirit. The flesh and the
spirit are antagonistic to each other. The body is the source of fantasies,
desires, impulses, imaginations and temptations, which far from helping us to
discover the truth must continually be checked and corrected.

In seeking to understand the human image of God as a contribution to a
theology of disability, we must commence not with the formal belief structure of
Christian theology, which exists as ideas, beliefs and concepts in the form of
sentences but with an epistemology rooted in bodily structures. To be disabled
is to have a different physical or mental structure. It is these structures
themselves which must be the starting point for a theology of disability, and
this can only be done if the body itself becomes the starting point for
knowledge, and thus for understanding the human image of God.

The question which we must ask, therefore, deals not so much with the nature
and criteria for knowledge, but with the character and origins of understanding.
When we ask about how we understand, the human questions about memory,
cognition, expectation, self-deception and so on inevitably arise. Mark Johnson
has pointed out that statements of human knowledge would be incomprehensible
without their metaphorical content.

‘We will have to find a way around the problem.’

‘The next step in the argument is as follows.’

‘ Let us have a closer look at this question.’

The metaphors in sentences such as these are not merely decorative, nor do
they merely tend to make our conversation more colourful. Rather, Johnson
argues, they may be traced back to patterns of experience or schemata, in which
our bodily experience is generalised. Without such fundamental experiences,
which occur from earliest infancy, of distinguishing between this and that, of
being in front or at the back, of going forward or being blocked, of learning
about place and weight and time and so on, it would not be possible for us to
make our lives in the world intelligible. Our language is the fruit of these
deep roots, and thus our thinking is embodied right from the start.

This does not lead Johnson into a wholly subjective theory of meaning, for
the basic bodily experiences are common to all human beings, and most of them
are developed in social relations. This is why the metaphors which express
bodily experiences linguistically, are confirmed in public life, and bodily
knowledge notwithstanding its individual origin, remains public. Knowledge is
thus produced by a combination of subjective and objective factors. It is both
bodily and conceptual, situational and yet universal. This is what Johnson means
by a "semantics of understanding".

Bodies and Words

Johnson’s main concern is to establish the epistemological significance of
imagination, and he does this through describing the roots of imagination in
physical and social experience. In his understandable concern to defend his
theory of imagination from the charge of excessive subjectivity, he emphasises
the shared nature of metaphorical experience, thus establishing a degree of
objectivity for the imagination. In this context, he does not distinguish
between different kinds of bodies. So although his work is valuable as an
epistemological introduction to a phenomenology and a theology of disability, he
does not take us into that specific area.

This is less true of the phenomenological philosophers and psychologists upon
whom Johnson depends. Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides the heading "The
Body" for the first part of his Phenomenology of Perception. My body
is my point of view upon the world. My body is the perspective from which I
perceive everything else, but I forget this. Instead, I come to regard my body
as just one more of those things which I perceive to be in the world. Then I
speak as if on the table is my book, the telephone and my hand. I situate my
body in space just like the other things in the space around me. Merleau-Ponty
remarks that this is misleading, since the other objects in my world may
sometimes be present and at other times be absent, but my body is always there.
The body is not itself an object in the world; it is that by means of which, for
me, there are objects. A theory of the body is thus already a theory of
knowledge. However, because what is known is dependent upon the conditions of
knowledge, we become unaware of the creative intentionality of our own
consciousness.

Merleau-Ponty illustrates this world-generating character of embodied
knowledge by referring to the world as known by various kinds of unusual bodies.
He discusses the white cane of the blind person, pointing out that as the hand
of the blind person holds the cane, the hand is not aware of the cane itself,
but of the ground surface as revealed by the cane. The sharp point of
consciousness moves forward from the grip of the hand down to the tip of the
cane. In other words, the cane becomes an extension of one’s body.

The experience of the phantom limb reported by patients who have suffered
amputation is particularly significant. The foot itches although it has been
removed. We should understand this strange phenomenon not in terms of
neurological conditioning, e.g. your brain has always been used to receiving
sensations from that part of your body and it goes on regardless, but we should
instead interpret the phantom limb as representing the acceptance on the part of
the entire body as living in a certain world. The body has a certain way of
relating to that world. The refusal to acknowledge dismemberment is a way of
insisting upon remaining in that world. One represses the knowledge that one’s
body can no longer be at home in that world. If one accepts the mutilated body,
then one’s world becomes fractured. The task of building up a new world as a
new relationship between the dismembered body and the world is more painful and
challenging than the other option: preserving one’s normal world and denying
dismemberment.

The visual parallel to this is Anton’s Syndrome which takes place when
patients are unaware of their own blindness. They behave as if they can see, and
even confabulate visual experiences. When this condition is generalised to
include the denial of any impairment or disability, it is called anosognosia.
Sometimes a patient with a double impairment is aware of one but not of the
other. I acknowledge that my world is fractured in this respect but not in that
respect.

We may distinguish phenomenal consciousness from access consciousness.
Phenomenal consciousness means that I am aware of realities. Access
consciousness means that I know that I have this awareness of realities. The
object of phenomenal consciousness is the world itself, but the objects of
access consciousness are symbols, words and thoughts. This distinction is
well-established in the experimental literature, where people deny that they
have seen the flashing of a light but can point to the area from which the light
flashed. "Studies of blindsight strongly suggest that the processing of
visual stimuli can take place even when there is no phenomenal awareness of
seeing them". In other words, information can be obtained from visual areas
in spite of the fact that there is no conscious visual awareness. Amnesiac
patients who are shown a range of pictures may later on be unable to remember
that they have been shown the pictures or even taken part in such an experiment,
but may be able to distinguish between pictures which are familiar to them and
those which are not. There appears in such cases to be phenomenal memory without
access memory. A sleepwalker who safely negotiates a window ledge has phenomenal
consciousness but no access consciousness.

These cases of malfunction are relevant to the general phenomenon of world
projection from the body. Gender is a case in point. Gender so thoroughly
permeates my perceptions and interpretations of myself and of the world that it
becomes invisible to me. As a man, I may become unaware of my masculinity; to
me, that is just the way things are. My phenomenal awareness is so taken for
granted as the basis of my experience that I do not possess access awareness of
it. It is the task of gender training which combats sexism to raise phenomenal
awareness to the level of access awareness. We can now understand why it is that
most sighted people do not know that they are sighted but just think the world
is like that. They have phenomenal awareness of sight but little access
awareness of it. Only when the clock stops ticking do you realise that you have
been hearing it. Only when you become blind do you realise that you were living
in a sighted world. So it is that most sighted people, who have perhaps never
experienced disability or had occasion to empathise with a disabled loved one,
do not acknowledge a plurality of genuine human worlds. To them, there is the
commonsense world to which some people do not have access. Thus there is the
world of normality and there are disabled people who have the misfortune to be
excluded from that world. The world of childhood is also inaccessible to this
kind of global totalism. Relativisation is the key to pluralisation, and
pluralisation is the key to mutual understanding and acceptance.

The Face of God in the Bible

Nowhere is this monism of the majority more obvious than in the biblical
references to the face of God. "When He (God) is quiet, who can condemn?
When He hides His face, who can behold Him?" (Job 34:29). "They think
in their heart ‘God has forgotten. He has hidden His face. He will never see
it’" (Ps. 10:11). "As for me, I shall behold your face in
righteousness; when I awake I shall be satisfied beholding your likeness"
(Ps.17: 15). "May God be gracious to us and bless us, and make his face to
shine upon us" (Ps.67: 1). "So Jacob called the place Peniel saying
‘for I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved’" (Gen.
32:30). When Jacob had become reconciled to his brother Esau, he said "for
truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God, since you have received
me with such favour" (Gen. 33:10).

These and many other similar passages reflect a sighted person’s view of
the world, including relationships with other human beings. The projection from
the human face to the face of God is particularly clear in the way Jacob
addresses Esau. Not only is this perfectly natural; it is almost impossible to
imagine that it could have been otherwise. However, when the unconscious and
taken-for-granted preference for the world of the sighted person is accompanied
by an equally unconscious but all-pervasive prejudice against the world of blind
people, we have an ethical problem, a problem of inclusion, a problem of the
absolutisation of the normal to the exclusion and disadvantage of the minority.
Throughout the Bible blindness is a symbol of ignorance, sin and unbelief. We
find this metaphorical use as early as Exodus 23:7-9: "Do not accept a
bribe, for a bribe blinds those who see and twists the words of the
righteous" (Compare Deut. 16:18-20). "All who make idols are nothing,
and the things they treasure are worthless. Those who would speak up for them
are blind; they are ignorant to their own shame" (Is. 44:8-10).
"Israel’s watchmen are blind, they all lack knowledge; they are all mute
dogs; they cannot bark..." (Is. 56:9f). "Leave them: they are blind
guides" (Matt. 15:13). Blindness is generally regarded as a punishment
inflicted by God (Gen. 19:11; Deut.28: 27-29; 2 Kgs 6:18; Acts 13:10-12).

It is the references in the gospels to blindness which display most vividly
the prejudices of the sighted world and are the cause of most distress to blind
people. The healings of blind people are generally regarded as symbolic of
discipleship. This is particularly clear in the story of Bartimaeus
(Mk.10:46-52). As a result of his faith, he followed Jesus along the way (v.52).
The symbol of blindness as unbelief and sin occupies the central place in the
Gospel of John, where the discussion at the end of chapter nine, following the
restoration of the sight of the man born blind, reveals this clearly.
"Jesus said ‘for judgement I have come into this world, so that the blind
will see and those who see will become blind’" (v.39).

Some of the most vivid passages in which the sight of the human face is used
as a symbol of spiritual progress and enlightenment appear in the letters of
Paul. "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to
face" (1 Cor. 13:12), "and all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the
glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror are being transformed into the
same image from one degree of glory to another" (2 Cor. 3:18) and perhaps
the most beautiful and significant of all such passages, "For it is the God
who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has shone in our hearts to
give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ" (2 Cor.4:6).

Living Without Faces

What does the human face mean to a blind person? At this point, I must speak
rather personally, but I know that other blind people share my experience. In
the months that followed my own loss of sight, I began to notice that the people
in my acquaintance fell into one of two possible groups. There were those who
had faces, when I conjured up their image in my memory, and there were those who
did not have faces. The first group were those whom I had known before I went
blind; the second group were those people whom I had met since my loss of sight.
At first, I could not help imagining what these people might look like, and
vivid impressions of various facial appearances would flash before my
imagination. Gradually, however, as I entered more deeply into the blind
condition the vivid imaginations faded. After some years, I had reached the
point where I was so naturalised into the world of blindness that it was only
with a slight shock of surprise I could remember that people looked like
anything. I had not only lost the images of the faces of particular people; I
had lost the entire category of looking like anything. I had to make an effort
of memory to realise that to sighted people there was something called ‘look
like’ which was very important to them.

No doubt it is difficult to imagine the world in which other people live. If
you, as a sighted person, were to close your eyes, and think of one of your dear
friends or loved ones, the picture of the face of that person would irresistibly
come to mind. Try it now, and see if you can prevent the image of the face
appearing in your imagination. Some of the sighted people that I have asked tell
me that they can manage this feat for a few moments by concentrating on the
shoes of the friend or by imagining that they are staring hard at a button or at
the handbag which the friend is carrying. However, this seems to be difficult if
not impossible to maintain: the face keeps coming into view. For a blind person,
on the other hand, there simply is no face. Nothing comes into mind of a
pictorial nature which represents the features of the face. The memories which a
blind person has of someone else gather first around the name of the person and
then around the memories of everything which that person has said and done. In
the presence of the other, it is the voice which expresses the person, not the
face.

One must also remember that although the senses are unified in subjectivity,
the experience offered by one sense is incommensurable with another. One may
tell a person blind from birth that the colour red is like the sound of a
trumpet, and although this will convey the notion that redness is bold and
challenging, it will not actually convey the slightest impression of redness
itself. If you are my close friend, I may, perhaps, be invited to touch your
face. This, however, will give me very little information about what your face
looks like. Certainly, I will learn that you have a beard, but I do not remember
what a beard looks like; I only know that it is short and bristly. This is most
true in the case of the eyes. In the first place, it is difficult to touch the
human eye. Even if you close your eyes and invite me to feel the roundness of
your closed eyelid, it bares no resemblance at all to the radiant colour and
fleeting emotion and the sense of inter-personal subjectivity which sighted
people get through eye contact.

What does the Bible know of this experience? Very little, if anything at all.
Particularly in the Psalms, God is described as hiding his face from Israel.
This makes sense to sighted people, for they refuse to have eye contact with
people from whom they are estranged, and to look away is a gesture of dismissal,
if not contempt. In the world of sighted people, you cover your face in order to
disguise your identity. So the bank robber wears a mask, and so do the people at
a fancy dress party. A blind person, on the other hand, does not know whether
your face is masked or not, although your voice may sound muffled. Blind people
can certainly tell when you are looking at them, because your voice is projected
directly towards them. It is the voice to which they pay attention, not the
face.

The Bible, however, comes from a sighted world in which it was natural to
speak of the human image of God in terms of the appearance of God as prefigured
in the relationships which sighted people have with each other. In this context,
the face is of supreme importance. "If we are born alone, it is through the
face that we first experience things out there that are like us, that respond to
us, and which by making faces we can influence". "The sharing of life
and of experience, which is the joy of parenthood, begins in the face". The
evolution of consciousness is difficult to understand without the face, for the
face is the main access to the mind. We are biologically prepared from birth to
respond to facial expression. Infants only a few days old are capable of
imitating adult expression. Although facial expressions might convey slightly
different emotions from culture to culture, the way these emotions are
recognised in, for example, movements of the eyebrows or the mouth, retain their
significance across cultures. Experiments with computerised facial images, where
either the sound of the voice or the picture of the face could be omitted or
varied, show that the content of a message is better understood when the face is
visible. "In face to face communication, perception of speech does not
necessarily result from just the sound but somehow emerges from the sound and
sight of the face collectively".

Of course, blindness is not the only human condition which introduces a
variation on the theme of the face. People with autism are not cut off from the
sight of the face but are profoundly severed from the emotions and the mind
behind the face. "Autistic subjects actively avoid the face, to avoid
complex signals of mood in other people, which on the one hand, they can hardly
decipher and, on the other threaten to overwhelm them". Jonathan Cole
interviewed people with many different kinds of facial loss or disfigurement and
concluded that it is the world of the autistic person rather than the world of
the blind that is really a world without faces because there is no theory of
mind, the mind of the non-autistic person. The only glimmering of understanding
into others on the part of an autistic person is into another person with
autism. Mention should also be made of prosagnosia, a condition in which people
are unable to recognise the faces of their loved ones or friends. A remarkable
feature of this strange condition is that the prosopagnostnic patient can often
recognise various features of the face, such as the gender, age or hair
colouring, but is unable to identify the possessor of the face.

In his remarkable book about the face, Jonathan Cole says that he could have
interviewed film stars or well-known politicians, people whose beautiful or
famous faces are always before the public eye. However, in order to probe the
meaning of the human face, he decided to go to those who had in some sense lost
the face, whose faces had become immobile, disfigured, palsied, blinded, and
amongst these people he had discovered a revitalisation of deep life".

The Face in Philosophy and Theology

It is surprising, perhaps, that on the whole those who write books on
theology and the philosophy of religion do not follow the method of Jonathan
Cole. When they seek to describe human responsibility and human relationships,
using the face as the focus of their writing, they assume the sole reality of
the sighted world. This becomes almost ironic when the subject of discussion is
the miracles of the New Testament in which Jesus is described as restoring the
sight of the blind. In approximately twenty such articles written over the past
fifteen years, I have not found a single concession to the fact that these
stories express a sighted point of view, nor any awareness of how the stories
might strike a blind reader. No doubt there are plenty of articles written about
the healing miracles of Jesus which do display such sensitivity; it just happens
that I have not come upon them.

The role of the human face is particularly noteworthy in the writings of
Emmanuel Levinas. Transcendence breaks into our lives when we take
responsibility for our fellow human beings and "such a responsibility is a
response to the imperative of gratuitous love which comes to me from the face of
another". The abandonment of being into existence, and the unique election
of each individual is viewed in the face. It is the face of the other that
summons me to this responsibility. For Levinas, the nakedness of the face
represents the vulnerability of each human being, for whom there is no defence
or covering. The core of the infinite is "a summons which comes to me from
the face of the neighbour", "here I am: under your gaze, obliged to
you". When I relate to another "it is not the knowledge of his
character, or his social position or his needs but his nudity as the needy one,
the destitution inscribed upon his face. It is his face as destitution which
asks me as responsible, and by which his needs can only count for me". Yes,
but all this presupposes that one can see the face of the other.

It is clear from what has been said about Levinas that his use of the human
face, although very individual and concrete, referring as it does to my presence
before the specific other who claims my response, remains a symbol. Levinas is
not interested in the psychology or physiology of the face. He seldom refers to
the face as having any characteristics, except that the eyes of the other gaze
upon one. For Levinas, the face does not smile or frown, it is not a face with a
specific gender, nor is it a singing face. In that sense, the use of the face in
Levinas is quite similar to its use in the Bible. The face of God indicates the
presence of God. Nevertheless, everything depends upon being able to see the
face, and the fact that Levinas so often emphasises the muteness of the face of
the other heightens the visual presuppositions of his style.

In the case of David Ford, although the symbolic character of the face
becomes more apparent as his book on Self and Salvation proceeds, the
much more detailed descriptions of the face suggest a deeper involvement in the
particularities of sighted life. The opening sentence of the first chapter is
"we live before the faces of others". "Words have their primary
context in faces". The Christian Church might be described as "the
transformation of facing before the face of Christ". "Christianity is
characterised by the simplicity and the complexity of facing: being faced by
God, embodied in the face of Christ; turning to face Jesus Christ...being
members of a community of the face; seeing the face of God reflected in creation
and especially in each human face, with all the faces in our heart related to
the presence of the face of Christ; having an ethic of gentleness…towards each
face...". In this opening chapter, we are presented with an unrelieved
visual theology. To be "faceless" is to be anonymous, to be a
non-person. Although rich and beautiful in its descriptions of the face, there
is no relativisation of facial experience.

This does not mean that David Ford is not sensitive towards the other senses.
Chapter five deals with the singing self, and shows a rich sensitivity to music
and to sound in general. However, even here the significance of singing lies
very largely in its face to face character. "Singing is seen as a desirable
form of face to face address between members of the community, and between
singers and God". "I sing before the faces of those before whom I have
learned to worship, and whom I call to worship". There are no references to
deafness.

The discussion by David Ford of the face of the dead Christ is both tender
and profound. We are led dramatically into the realisation of the dead face.
After speaking from the Cross, breathing, and crying out, we are then left with
a dead face (p.192). This is the projection of a sighted theology. From a blind
perspective, when the breathing and crying have stopped, we are left with
silence. Ford imagines nothing between the living, glorified, speaking
worshipping singing face and the dead face. There is no place in his theological
imagery for the disfigured face, the immobilised face, the face afflicted by a
stroke, the scarred and the blinded face. The face is tortured and bloody, but
it is dead. It is as if there is only normality: the normality of life, the
normality of suffering and the normality of death. From death, and Ford
emphasises with a fine theological insight, that the death was a real death, and
that the resurrection was a rising from the dead, not just a delayed coming down
from the cross. Always, however, the face is seen.

Conclusion

Does it matter? Must majorities always take minorities into account? Cannot
sighted people enjoy their world, theologise about their world, speak to each
other in that world without blind people nipping their heels? After all, the
principal source of Christian theology, the Bible, acknowledges blindness,
deafness and other disabilities only to marginalise and denigrate them.

It matters because such attitudes reinforce the central core of Christian
exclusivism. Even in the writings of such enlightened and insightful sighted
people as those I have been discussing, such attitudes lend support to the core
of that exclusivism which, amongst other things, ignores other religions, only grudgingly comes to accept the ministry of women, supports an ideology of
uniqueness, and of the normality of the superior which has brought disgrace upon
the Christian tradition throughout the world. It matters because in this world
of approximately three billion people, there are about six hundred million
disabled people, and the gospel is for them also.

Strangely, there is one aspect of the face of Christ which Ford does not
refer to. It is the blindfolded Christ. The dead face of Christ witnesses to the
laying down of his life in the nothingness of death. The blindfolded face
represents the living Christ who enters into the experience of literally blinded
people, and becomes their brother. While sighted people may quite naturally
behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, blind people may just as
naturally respond to the glory of God in the face of the one who was blindfolded
for us.